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blogging: what it’s for, how it pays

What is blogging for? How does blogging pay? I have a couple of "answer candidates.

1. What is blogging for?

I have a friend whose mom, an avid gardener, retired to West Africa. If Mom doesn’t like the look of her new garden, she only has to replant, and, hey presto, she has something new and fully formed in a couple of weeks. Things grow so fast, Mom has taken to experimenting. "What would happen if we made everything blue? Twelve days later, she knows.

Blogs are experiments. Each of them says, in effect, what happens to this way of thinking if we apply it to a variety of topics for an extended period? Do the ideas flourish or wither? Do they evolve or merely repeat? Do they scale up in their complexity, or, forgive me, bog down.

If things go well, I guess, blogs go off like an alpine ecosystem: tiny flora make a platform for minor flora which make a platform for major flora. Pretty soon, there’s a forest on a slope. Actually, in the best case, blogs "terra form." By steadily converting ambient resources, own and others, they create a sustainable intellectual space where none before was possible. They make their own worlds, and so prove the possibility of these worlds. They "discover" worlds by creating them.

To be sure, we can’t intervene or experiment as my friends Mom does. Bloggers are notoriously resistant to external influences when these are unsolicited. But then we probably don’t have to intervene. There are so many blogs out there, any thing we might want to try is probably happening on a "naturally occurring" basis. Curious about a libertarian take on the politics of the opera world on the eastern seaboard? It’s out there somewhere.

One of the key questions here ("loose concept/sliding metaphor" alert) is whether the blog is actually ventilating. Anyone can build a little world sui generis. Just bang away at our favorite topics often and at length, and Bob’s your uncle. But good blogs inhale data before they exhale comment. And we expect them to address the big issues in a timely fashion (the presidential elections, say) even as they show a certain imagination and versatility in finding issues not now on reader’s radar.

A friend at Cambridge did his thesis on the epic poem and he was particularly interested in the notion of the "sustain." Could the poet sustain themes in large and small over the vast architecture of a poem? And this is an issue for blogging. Some people are entirely without themes and pretty completely episodic. Others are the captives of a few mighty themes and their slavish repetition. All of us hope for a sweet spot: a body of smart and various themes that organize without compressing discourse, that give us analytic range without costing us focus, that give the blog an exoskeleton without specifying what it must look like day to day.

To put the matter more honestly: every little blog is buffeted by the high winds of a dynamic culture even as it has its favorite "go to" ideas with which it is most comfortable making sense of the world. This is, I think, pragmatic sweet spot of the blogging world. The real challenges here, I guess, is constantly to cultivate and enlarge the "go to" ideas without taking on or forswearing too much of the world in the process. Our sweet spot should be the smallest, most powerful ideas that illuminate the largest, most various parts of the world most cleanly. I do realize there is a notion of parsimony here that the "po mo" party no longer cares about or thinks possible. But it is worth pointing out that it is precisely this parsimony that gives a blog its claim to something like an identity and a readership.

Finally, blogs are tests. Can the blogger sustain a discourse that is recognizable but cannot be anticipated, in which utterances play back constantly in the reformation of the code from which they come, over a set of applications that is neither too small or too large, out of which emerges a way of thinking that draws from, touches on, but does not duplicate other players in the field, in the creation of an "idea space" that is disciplined and reckless, venturing and themed, marshaled and fecund, and finally, getting some where? This is hard, and this is the test of blogging.

And the test of the test is the sheer daily press of blogging. We have to do it every day, or just about every day. And this means we are, as journalists are, forced to go with what we have, forced to live with the imperfections of the moment and the limitations of our "art." You can’t be precious. You have to go with what you know. This puts you in intimate contact with your own limitations, and now you have an additional carrying cost: a certain self loathing. But constant bloggers are a lot like journalists, professional athletes, theatrical performers. It isn’t perfect? Of course, it isn’t perfect. Just do it. "Good enough for television" is a phrase most bloggers would recognize.

16 thoughts on “blogging: what it’s for, how it pays”

As you indicate, the beauty of blogging is its experimental, selective, micro/macro, signature-based spontaneity.

I recognize the experience you describe when you say, “blogs are experiments.” When I began writing my blog in May, I knew what I believed, but had no idea how those beliefs would play out over the events that would come over the transom every day. This has been one of the pleasures of blogging: sitting down at the keyboard and determining, “what does our slant on reality have to say about today’s events?”

And this means, blogging=editing. As you say, since I began blogging, one of the day’s tasks is now riding that chopper between big events and small ones, things everyone’s seen (but differently than we do) and issues not on readers’ radar that can be illuminated by our point of view.

All of which is carried along by “the sustain”: the large and small themes that are our “go to” ideas. You don’t always pay attention to the sustain (at the risk of become a pedant), but if that force does not propel a blog entry, the words feel obligatory, perfunctory, uninspired.

Keeping the “how” of this endeavor, its style, “recognizable but not anticipated” is a matter of voice, right? I wrote my dissertation on person perception and focused on our ability to recognize stylistic consistency across situational variations. That’s a pretty well-developed ability, as it turns out. So, (to use a common operatic example) it’s not hard to recognize a Puccini aria from its first few notes, regardless of its particular uniqueness. Pattern recognition (the title of Gibson’s latest excellent novel, by the way).

And, finally, blogging demands we do all this in the press of the everyday, in something approaching real time. In hindsight, some of what I’ve written makes me cringe with embarrassment, but it’s been good for me to know that I’m expecting myself to write something just about every day. And if it’s not perfect (which it never is) well, OK then.

But, what I’m really looking forward to is you telling me, tomorrow, how to make this pay!

Tom, all very well said, what is “signature based spontaneity.” I like the idea of the pen moving, the ink flowing, even as the idea is forming, real time delivery as it were. And that maybe is what the idea space we create when we create a blog is most personally useful for, it mobilizes all the things we think and all the intellectual resources with which we think, so that we are prepared to see the significance of the new things that come over the transom, in your phrase. It’s a little like that notion I was trying to get at, the notion of being on your toes, in a dynamic world we are more responsive when we are in motion, whatever this motion is. As to how to make blogging pay, sorry to bait and switch. I will write this up Friday. I just had to comment on the CNN firing of Tucker Carlson.

I was looking for a phrase that incorporated the consistency of style/approach/voice (“signature”) that permits us to recognize something as the work of a familiar hand, and the real-time character of commenting on “breaking events,” like the Tucker Carlson announcement. A little esoteric, but, there it is.

This is what I’m wrestling with. I just retired one URL & launched another. I wasn’t informed enough about the issues that I had declared I was blogging about, so I have repackaged and pledged to be more non-specific for a while.

Anyone can build a little world sui generis. Just bang away at our favorite topics often and at length, and Bobs your uncle. But good blogs inhale data before they exhale comment. And we expect them to address the big issues in a timely fashion (the presidential elections, say) even as they show a certain imagination and versatility in finding issues not now on readers radar.

& what is the broader relevance of my little world? I’m not sure that I know yet, but I think that in collecting the curious I will eventually find out. Thanks for the analysis, though, it helps as I decide again to continue posting.

gotta admit this is all a bit over my head as it is fascinating compelling and therapuetic all at the same time

my own little blog is primarily a platform for my creative writing born from an emerging email poetry style that has evolved from years of writing and self publishing and raving at coffeehouses with an altruistic twist of hoping for conversation and interactivity thrown in

i feel no pressure to write daily or broach current topics but i do endeavor to facilitate comments and conversation and to that end find myself linksurfing around trying to learn how others do it

that has led me here and to many other fascinating places where i have discovered generous amounts of wonderful stuff and can only wish my readers half as much fun as i have had

my fifty something brain still believes in the power of communication to generate understanding and although many people in this world are illiterate and many more don’t have computers and many many more could care less about reading blogs i still feel that this is part of a revolutionary trend and the more fun it is for us the more powerful it will be so rave on blog brothers and to quote one of my personal heros – garrison keillor – ‘do good work’

gotta admit this is all a bit over my head as it is fascinating compelling and therapuetic all at the same time

my own little blog is primarily a platform for my creative writing born from an emerging email poetry style that has evolved from years of writing and self publishing and raving at coffeehouses with an altruistic twist of hoping for conversation and interactivity thrown in

i feel no pressure to write daily or broach current topics but i do endeavor to facilitate comments and conversation and to that end find myself linksurfing around trying to learn how others do it

that has led me here and to many other fascinating places where i have discovered generous amounts of wonderful stuff and can only wish my readers half as much fun as i have had

my fifty something brain still believes in the power of communication to generate understanding and although many people in this world are illiterate and many more don’t have computers and many many more could care less about reading blogs i still feel that this is part of a revolutionary trend and the more fun it is for us the more powerful it will be so rave on blog brothers and to quote one of my personal heros – garrison keillor – ‘do good work’

Gotta admit this is all a bit over my head as it is fascinating compelling and therapuetic all at the same time.

My own little blog is primarily a platform for my creative writing born from an emerging email poetry style that has evolved from years of writing and self publishing and raving at coffeehouses with an altruistic twist of hoping for conversation and interactivity thrown in.

I feel no pressure to write daily or broach current topics but I do endeavor to facilitate comments and conversation and to that end find myself linksurfing around trying to learn how others do it.

That has led me here and to many other fascinating places where I have discovered generous amounts of wonderful stuff and can only wish my readers half as much fun as I have had.

My fifty something brain still believes in the power of communication to generate understanding and although many people in this world are illiterate and many more don’t have computers and many many more could care less about reading blogs I still feel that this is part of a revolutionary trend and the more fun it is for us the more powerful it will be so rave on blog brothers and to quote one of my personal heros, garrison keillor, ‘do good work’.

gotta admit this is all a bit over my head as it is fascinating compelling and therapuetic all at the same time

my own little blog is primarily a platform for my creative writing born from an emerging email poetry style that has evolved from years of writing and self publishing and raving at coffeehouses with an altruistic twist of hoping for conversation and interactivity thrown in

i feel no pressure to write daily or broach current topics but i do endeavor to facilitate comments and conversation and to that end find myself linksurfing around trying to learn how others do it

that has led me here and to many other fascinating places where i have discovered generous amounts of wonderful stuff and can only wish my readers half as much fun as i have had

my fifty something brain still believes in the power of communication to generate understanding and although many people in this world are illiterate and many more don’t have computers and many many more could care less about reading blogs i still feel that this is part of a revolutionary trend and the more fun it is for us the more powerful it will be so rave on blog brothers and to quote one of my personal heros – garrison keillor – ‘do good work’

I have been working as a community newspaper journalist for more than 20 years, and blogging is a completely different outlet for me. Similar to a column, my blog (still very new and once a week) is being read not by the general reader as a newspaper column would be, but by a specialized audience. It is almost like a trade publication or “narrowcasting” vs. broadcasting. A blog presents an opportunity to be a bit edgier, a bit more analytical and reach a reader that has more knowledge and interest.